Frank V. Gardner

He Knows What He's Doing

One day in March, my little girl and I had lunch together. We looked outside, across the lawn, and talked about the weather. The wind was strong; the cedar trees were in its billows dancing. The clouds were moving swiftly by; the scene was quite entrancing.

'Look, daddy, 'Maureen said to me, 'how hard the wind is blowing! I betcha on a colder day, that blowing would be snowing! And what is it keeps yonder rocks from leaving where they're staying, While, overhead, those cedar trees are back-and-forward swaying? '

'It's gravity, 'I said, a force by which our God is proving That He can make those rocks stay put, while flimsy things are moving.' We also spoke of nature: how it helps God keeping order.Then I could see impressions being made upon my daughter.

We even spoke of when our God receives us into heaven. I told her she would understand that more at age of seven. She squinted up where clouds, and sky, and shapes were interchanging....I wondered in what areas her 'childish' mind was ranging.

'Those holes up in the sky', she said, 'I hope have bottoms to them.How else would God be able to keep us from falling through them? ' 'Our God, ' I said, 'has loving hands; he'd hold us very gently; He wouldn't let us fall at all.' She looked at me intently.

Then, I could tell, her 'growing' mind had something in it brewing. She thought.... and smiled.... And reconciled: 'Well, He know what He doing! '

(I had this conversation in 1959 with my pre-school daughter, Maureen, who was almost six at the time. The poem was written a few years later, January 1965, in Vienna, Virginia.)